The Price of Freedom

A History of East Central Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present

Piotr S. Wandycz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351541299
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

The Price of Freedom surveys and explains the fascinating and intricate history of East Central Europe - the present day countries of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. Taking a thematic approach, the author explores such issues and controversies as the tension between the industrial developed West and the agrarian East Central Europe, the rise of modern nationalism, democracy and authoritarianism and Communism. While the countries of East Central Europe have differed dramatically from one another, the author asserts that they have been bound by a certain community of fate. These comparisons are traced through the Middle Ages and the Early Modern era to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This exploration reveals that it is no accident that the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland were the first among the former Soviet bloc nations to be admitted to NATO, and are likely to become the first members of the expanded European Union. Thus an understanding of their experiences, contributions and their place within the European community of nations vastly enriches our knowledge of Europe's past and present.The second edition of this distinguished book brings the history of the region up to date. It discusses the events of the post-communist decade of the 1990s and the problems resulting from the transition to democracy and market economy.

1

THE MEDIEVAL HERITAGE

THE ORIGINS

By the year 1000 medieval Christendom had expanded eastward, bringing under its sway most Slavs and Magyars; the entity which we call Europe was born. Only the Baltic peoples and the virtually extinct Polabian Slavs remained pagan. Czechs, Croats, Hungarians, Slovaks, and Poles were converted by Rome; Kievan Rus (out of which modern Russia and the Ukraine emerged) and the southern Slavs were baptized by Constantinople. This had long-range repercussions. The Byzantine Greek Orthodox tradition differed considerably from the Latin. While both affected the region which we call East Central Europe the predominant and lasting impact came from the West.

Acceptance of Christianity by Hungarians and western Slavs (Poles, Czechs, Croats, and Slovaks) meant the exposure to Western civilization and all that it implied: an international language and alphabet (Latin), Romanesque and Gothic art, new concepts of law, economy, government. This was a civilization that had drawn on the rich heritage of antiquity, never fully destroyed even during the Dark Ages. Here, Roman-Germanic-Celtic elements mingled in the countryside, while towns, centers of civilization, survived as seats of ecclesiastical hierarchy and provided for cultural continuity. The challenge of Christianity was the first of many challenges to come from the West. How successfully did East Central Europe respond to it? How did it develop during the next five centuries? Did it “catch up” with the West? These are the basic questions raised in this chapter.

East Central Europe was a “new” Europe in the sense that it had never been part of the Roman empire. Yet to conceive it as an empty frame waiting to be filled with content would hardly be correct. Its peoples must have reached a certain level to be able to accept, absorb, and to stamp with their own individuality the new values transmitted to them. Admittedly the process of Christianization was slow. It took up to three centuries before the new religion and all it stood for shaped the outlook and the way of life of the western Slavs or Hungarians. The initial confrontation must have been dramatic, and myths have grown around it. Some medieval chroniclers and romantic historians bemoaned the loss of innocence of the early Slavs – portrayed as freedom-loving equals living in conditions of primitive democracy – lost to or corrupted by the feudal, Germanic West. Magyar mythology glorified the alleged ancestors, the Huns, and represented their dreaded leader Attila as the “sword of God,” who punished the world for its iniquities.

Our knowledge of the formative period of East Central Europe is scanty. We know little about agriculture and animal husbandry. As for the population, it lived in less advantageous geographic and climatic conditions than in the West and was lower in numbers and density.

Table 1.1 Population estimates, c. 1000

	Population (in millions)	Density per sq. km
France	9.0	16.0
Germany	5.4	10.0
British Isles	2.5	7.9
Italy	7.0	24.0
Poland	1.25	5.0
Hungary (without Croatia)	1.0
Bohemia	1.0	7.8

Source: M. Małowist, Wschód i zachód Europy w XIII-XVI w. Konfrontacje struktur społeczno-gospodarczych (Warsaw, 1973), p. 20.

Political evolution bore some resemblance to that of the Germanic-Frankish states of the sixth or seventh centuries, but it occurred about two hundred years later. This was hardly an idyllic Golden Age but rather an age of iron, as testified by the strife that accompanied the building up of the state. The process was most likely that of progressive, often forcible amalgamation of clans or tribes under the leadership of a chieftain or duke. His ability to transform a tribal organization into a territorial unit depended largely on the armed retinue (drużyna in Polish, družina in Czech, jobbági in Hungarian) that transcended clannish loyalties and was housed, fed, and commanded by the duke himself. All the land was theoretically the ruler’s property (dominium directum), while cultivated land belonged, although was not in his full ownership, to the user (dominium utile). The ducal control over the country was assured through a system of fortified places or castles in which an official administered the surrounding area as judge, tax collector, and war-leader, and tended to the ruler’s domain properly speaking. He received as pay part of the latter’s produce. Around some castles pre-urban conglomerations arose, in which settled the artisans who worked for the duke and his retinue. The emerging society formed a pyramid with the duke and his officials and knights-warriors at the top and various categories of free or half-free men and slaves at the bottom.

How was this society affected by contact with the West, particularly by feudalism and the position of the church and monarch? Before turning to this question let us survey briefly the emergence and consolidation of states in the tenth century. Bohemia led the way, drawing on the tradition of the Great Moravian state in the ninth century. Great Moravia, comprising most of present-day Czechoslovakia and parts of southern Poland, was exposed to Christian missionaries from Constantinople (notably Cyril and Methodius) and involved in a mostly antagonistic relationship with the Frankish state. After Moravia’s fall at the turn of the ninth and tenth centuries, the political focus shifted westward to the region around Prague where the native dukes, the Přemyslids, eliminated rivals and led the process of state building. St Wenceslas (Václav) – associated with the Christmas carol – was one of the early dukes and patrons of Bohemia. A Czech princess married the Polish duke Mieszko I and was instrumental in his baptism in 966. Mieszko, the first historic Polish ruler, expanded his sway – from the northern base around Gniezno and Poznań inhabited by the Polanie tribe – in all directions, including Cracow. His armed retinue was estimated by the Jewish-Spanish traveler Ibrahim Ibn Jacob at three thousand, a formidable fighting force. He was the real founder of the Piast dynasty that ruled Poland for several centuries.

Unlike the Czechs and Poles, the Hungarians were a nomadic tribe of Finno-Ugric descent who invaded the Pannonian plain in the late ninth century, led by Árpád, the founder of the Hungarian native dynasty. For the next sixty years the Magyars raided Western Europe, penetrating deep into Germany, Lombardy, and even France. A crushing defeat, which they suffered at German hands at the battle of Augsburg on the Lech river in 955, forced them to retreat to what is Hungary today and transform it from an operational base into a state.

Did West European feudalism shape the nature and the relationships of these states? Let us first clarify the use of this ambiguous term. Strictly speaking feudalism means a system in which the entire state structure is based on contractual personal arrangements between superiors and inferiors – lords and vassals – with land being the traditional form of reward for services. The vassal, placing himself under the protection of the lord, paid him homage and was invested with land that carried with it the obligation of serving the lord in war and often also in administrative and judiciary council. Land thus held in exchange for services was known as a fief. The fief could be, and was, sometimes sub-divided (in sub-infeodation) so that a feudal pyramid emerged with the lord (or king) on top, with chief vassals below him and sub-vassals at the bottom. This pure model was by no means omnipresent and it varied with time.

The term feudalism is also used in a more general sense to denote a regime in which a landed aristocracy predominated and lived on the fruits of labor of the lowest class, the peasantry. Although there were certainly peasants holding land as tenants in a way not drastically different from that of noble vassals, basically they were villeins or serfs. Various degrees of limitation were placed on their freedom and they were burdened with obligations known as socage in England, corvée in France, and Robot or pańszczyzna in Slavic countries. Finally, Marxists use the term feudalism to describe a pre-capitalist mode of production and land ownership.

Owing to different needs and circumstances only certain forms of feudalism (in its narrow sense) penetrated East Central Europe, and only with considerable delays. Fiefs existed mainly on the highest level: dukes (later kings) of Bohemia stood in a vassal relationship to the emperor, and this was also true about certain Polish duchies. But, some exceptions notwithstanding, neither the original ducal retainers nor the knights held the land in the form of fiefs. Military obligation stemmed from allegiance to a superior, but not in the typical vassal fashion. In Bohemia knights were more interested in land held in full ownership (that is, allodial land) than in fiefs. The feudal pyramid was virtually absent, although a dependence of the lesser nobles on the lords did develop sometimes, for instance, in the so-called familiares system in Hungary. But it involved no investiture properly speaking, nor did it give the lords full jurisdiction over freemen.

The phenomenon of chivalry and knighthood so characteristic of Western Europe in the feudal age also took divergent forms in the East Central European context. First, there was a delayed and rather superficial reception of external forms and customs. Second, while the exorbitant cost of armor and steeds tended to keep down the number of knights in the West, in Hungary and Poland the use of light cavalry, better suited to local warfare, contributed to their growing ranks. At a later time the practice of ennobling whole villages for military prowess led to a situation where – except for Spain – Poland and Hungary had the most numerous knightly class in Europe. We shall deal with the transformation of knights into nobility (which crystallized as an estate by the fourteenth or fifteenth century) later in this chapter.

Religion and the church occupied a central position in medieval society. The church differed from other institutions by its transcendental and universal nature. It acted as the spiritual guide and leader. It supervised education, from cathedral schools to universities. At times it aspired to supremacy over temporal rulers, but at the same time it was enmeshed, as an institution and as individual clergymen, in the feudal structure of political-economic power. In the West it predated the formation of states and played a key role in the revival of the empire under Charlemagne. It came to East Central Europe as missionary and carrier of Western civilization, overawing the Slavs and the Magyars with its cultural superiority, the external splendor of liturgy, the didactic arts, and the entire system of new values and precepts. Christianity was imposed from above and was meant to strengthen the young monarchies. Perhaps this combination provoked the reaction to it, in the form of bloody pagan uprisings in Bohemia in the tenth century and in Hungary and Poland in the eleventh.

Around the year 1000 Poland and Hungary obtained ecclesiastical organizations directly dependent on the Holy See, and headed by archbishops of Gniezno and Esztergom. The bishopric of Prague was subordinated first to Regensburg, then to Mainz, and achieved a metropolitan status only by mid-fourteenth century. The subsequently developed network of dioceses and parishes, however, was more dense in Bohemia than in Poland or Hungary, although much less so than in Italy. The connection between this phenomenon and urbanization – to be dealt with later – seems obvious.

The interaction between church, state, and society was of a multiple nature. The East Central European rulers sought direct links with Rome, while seeking at the same time to limit Rome’s power in domestic matters, for instance the nomination of bishops. The early patriarchal dukes or kings drew their counselors from the ranks of upper clergy and wished to have a voice in their selection. On the parish level the noble sought similar rights of patronage. Attempts to dominate the ecclesiastical hierarchy built into the state structure led to clashes, comparable, although not identical, to the great Investiture Controversy between the pope and the emperor in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The clergy gained some freedoms and privileges during this period in Poland, and in the thirteenth century in Bohemia. Later kings would, however, reassert their rights of nomination of bishops. The church was meanwhile affected by local customs, and it is in that sense that historians speak of a folklorization of Christianity. The church in East Central Europe was influencing the development of these lands but it also came to reflect their way of life and culture.

Can one speak of national consciousness of the medieval societies of Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary? We must be careful not to apply modern concepts to the past even though recognizing certain similarities. The feeling of distinctiveness vis-à-vis outsiders is both ancient and basic, and “national” consciousness is thus formed in terms of the relationship to others. In the Middle Ages such terms as natio and gens appeared, lending credence to the view that just as antiquity was the time of cities and empires, so the Middle Ages gave birth to nations.

Admittedly the imprecise word natio did not mean nation as we understand it. At church councils or at universities a single natio comprised several nationalities. The criterion of “nationhood” usually comprised common descent, language, political allegiance, and territory, with shifting accents at different times. Common ancestry was invoked in the legend which makes Poles and Czechs the descendants of the two brothers Lech and Czech. The stress on a common ruler of the people was apparent from references to the dukes of Czechs and Poles, rather than to dukes of Bohemia and Poland. But the notion of territorial allegiance was not quite absent, since the ruler regarded the country as his patrimony and himself as the natural heir. The issue was, however, complicated by the fact that each son could claim the inheritance, the right of primogeniture (succession by the oldest son) being unknown in East Central Europe prior to the thirteenth century. This complication was partly overcome by the growing concept of the Crown that separated the institution of kingship from its actual incumbent. Thus, the notion of the Crown of the Polish Kingdom (Corona Regni Poloniae), for instance, served as a unifying factor, both legal and political, even if the state was fragmented into several duchies. The symbolism of the Crown of St Wenceslas in Bohemia and of St Stephen in Hungary was even more important, and the expression “Lands of the Crown of St Wenceslas” or “of St Stephen” denoted the territories respectively of Bohemia, Moravia (and later Silesia), and of Hungary, Transylvania, and Croatia-Dalmatia-Slavonia.

A Hungarian chronicler of the thirteenth century defined a Hungarian as a subject of the king, born in the country, and drawing his descent from the land. Two centuries later in Bohemia, Jerome of Prague stressed the religious element, declaring that common blood, language, and faith were the ingredients of the nation. By this time there was a tendency to restrict the term nation to “noble” or “political nation” that excluded the toiling masses. This was an important qualification.

A xenophobic attitude to foreigners, whether inhabitants of neighboring states or settlers – which often meant rivals – was an early phenomenon. Anti-Polish sentiments were prominent in some Czech chronicles and vice versa. Hungarians were not spared either. There were sporadic outbursts of antagonism of varying intensity against the migrating Germans and Jews, the two groups whose interrelation with East Central European states and societies has been of special importance for Czech, Polish, and Hungarian history. Other immigrants from western Europe, the clergymen, knights, or merchants who came at various times and in smaller numbers to the region, were more easily absorbed.

Medieval East Central Europe, especially Hungary, was multi-ethnic, although hardly more so than many states of that period in the West. The conquering Magyars found, apart from Avars and Gepides, a S...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of maps
• List of tables
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Preface
• A guide to pronunciation
• INTRODUCTION: WHAT’S IN A NAME?
• 1 THE MEDIEVAL HERITAGE
• 2 THE CHALLENGE OF THE MODERN AGE
• 3 THE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY CRISIS
• 4 ENLIGHTENED ABSOLUTISM OR ENLIGHTENED LIBERTY?
• 5 THE AGE OF LIBERAL NATIONALISM
• 6 FROM COMPROMISE TO INDEPENDENCE
• 7 THE DIFFICULT INDEPENDENCE
• 8 THE HARD ROAD TO FREEDOM
• Notes
• Chronological tables
• Bibliography
• Index